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Articulating Sadness, Gendering Space: The Politics and Poetics of Taiyu Films from
1960s Taiwan
Author(s): Yingjin Zhang
Source: Modern Chinese Literature and Culture , SPRING, 2013, Vol. 25, No. 1 (SPRING,
2013), pp. 1-46
Published by: Foreign Language Publications
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/42940461
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Articulating Sadness, Gendering
Space: The Politics and Poetics of
Taiyu Films from 1960s TaiwanŤ
Yingjin Zhang
Taiyu Films: A Cinema of Sadness Once Forgotten in Taiwan

Much has been written about New Taiwan Cinema in recent years (Berry/ Ť My thanks go to the University of
California, San Diego (UCSD) for a
Lu 2005; Davis/Chen 2007; Yeh/Davis 2005). In particular, City of Sadness
sabbatical leave from January to June
(Beiqing chengshi, 1989), directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien (Hou Xiaoxian, b. 2011; to the UCSD Academic Senate for
a research grant in 2011; to the Research
1947)# has been singled out to represent an audacious venture into the Center of Humanities and Social Sciences
world of "Taiyu" (Taiwanese dialect),1 in which linguistic issues posed an at the National Chung Hsing University
for a visiting fellowship funded by the
unexpected challenge to the authoritarian regime and articulated sadness National Science Council of Taiwan from
as a long-repressed pathos in local Taiwan culture (P. Liao 1993; Yip 1997; January to April 201 1; to the Chinese
Taipei Film Archive for granting me ac-
Reynaud 2002). Indeed, the KMT policy toward Taiyu remained intractable
cess to its growing Taiyu film collection
as late as 1988, 2 when a request from Chen Kunhou (b. 1939) to dub a in November 2000 and March 2011; to
my various hosts and friends in Taiwan
Taiyu version of his Osm a nth us Alley (Guihua xiang, 1987) for the Oscars
over the years, especially Robert Ru-shou
best foreign film competition in the United States was rejected by Taiwan's Chen, Chiù Kuei-fen, Lin Jiann-guang, Lin
Wen-chi; to Kirk Denton and two anony-
GIO (Government Information Office or Xinwen ju) on the grounds that
mous reviewers for Modern Chinese
Taiyu was not the "national language" ( guoyu ) and therefore could not Literature and Culture for their construc-
tive comments.
officially represent the Republic of China (ROC). A year later, Hou Hsiao-
hsien was fortunate because the GIO allowed him to send a print of City
1 The term "Taiyu" is a geographic
of Sadness from a Tokyo film-processing facility directly to the Venice Film misnomer because this dialect histori-
Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 1

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ca lly derived from and is still basi- Festival while at the same time a print was shipped back to film censors
cally the same as Minnanyu (dialect of
in Taipei. The surprising result of this exception was that the Golden Lion
southern Fujian), which is also known
as "Hokkienese" (Fujianese) or simply was awarded to Hou's work at Venice, the first ever such honor for any
"Hokkien." With "Hokkien" referencing
Chinese-language film. Subsequently, the Golden Horse Awards (Jinma
Fujian, a coastal province in mainland
China directly across from Taiwan, jiang) in Taiwan honored Hou with the best director prize in 1989, though
"Taiyu" is officially designated in Taiwan
some conservatives had questioned the eligibility of City of Sadness, which
as "Minnanyu," a dialect previously
known as "Xiayu" or "Amoy dialect" had technically violated the then-existing rule that the cumulative length
(Amoy being Xiamen, the largest city
of Taiyu dialogue not exceed one third of a film's entire dialogue (Huang
in this dialect region). In an official
Taiwan publication (GIO 2001: 40), Taiyu Ren 1994a: 23-24).
is referred to as "southern Fujianese"
and subdivided into "Quan-accented
With the success of City of Sadness, Taiwan cinema reclaimed the
southern Fujianese" and "Zhang- legitimacy of using Taiyu, which would further empower two new
accented southern Fujianese." "Quan"
generations of directors to ground their films firmly in the "native soil"
here means Quanzhou and "Zhang,"
Zhangzhou, two cities from which most ( xiangtu ) and "local" (bentu) experience of Taiwan (Davis 2012). As Douglas
early Taiwanese Han settlers migrated
Kellner (1998: 105) observes of Taiwan films from the 1980s, "often the
from the mainland. Complicating the
geo-linguistic map in this case is the fact directors cast nonprofessional actors and script dialogue in a way in
that other dialects and languages are
which the characters' dialects point to their specific region and class."
widely used in Taiwan, such as Hakka
( Kejiahua ) and aboriginal languages; For critics such as Kellner, the politics of "dialect" ( fangyan ) constitutes a
therefore, "Minnanyu" alone does not
distinguishing mark of New Taiwan Cinema. Strictly speaking, however, the
represent the entirety of Taiwan as the
English term "Taiwanese" implies. In the linguistic marker in New Taiwan Cinema, together with its emphasis on the
judgment of Jeremy Taylor (2008: 63),
rejuvenating native soil, the simultaneously alluring and alienating city,
"despite some differences in vocabulary
and accent, Taiyu is essentially Hokkien innocent but victimized ordinary folks, and above all a prevailing pathos
by another name" and "Taiyu, Min-
of sadness, was by no means groundbreaking in the history of Taiwan
nanyu, Xiayu and Hokkien are ostensibly
the same dialect." For this reason, cinema, for "Taiyu films" (Taiyu pian) from the mid-1950s through the
Taylor (2011: 12) uses "Taiwanese Hok-
early 1970s had already broached many of these topics and had articulated
kien" to designate Taiyu as a variety
of Hokkien. As preferred in some cases a distinctive pathos of sadness during an unsettling time of drastic social
(Wang 2012), another term for Taiyu or
change in Cold-War Taiwan. The existence of Taiyu films in Taiwan for so
Minnayu is "Holo" ( Heluo ), because this
dialect is believed to have preserved many years reminds us that the KMT government did not fully implement
most elements from the ancient speech
its policy on restricting Taiyu on the big screen until the 1970s and that as
originated in the Heluo region, a region
bounded by the Yellow River and the a cultural form, Taiyu films once successfully negotiated their way through
Luo River and routinely hailed as the
cradle of Chinese civilization. This con-
a precarious political climate.
notation of Holo, therefore, contradicts Not surprisingly, like Hou's City of Sadness, Taiyu films have also been
2 • Articulating Sadness , Gendering Space

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associated with the term "sadness" (beiqing), not least because Lin Fudi a recent attempt by Shu-mei Shih (2011)
to reconceptualize Taiyu as "Taiwanese
(b. 1934) directed an earlier Taiyu feature with the same title as Hou's#
language" on an equal footing with
City of Sadness (Beiqing chengshi, 1964), although the two films follow Mandarin ( guoyu as it is called in Taiwan
or putonghua in mainland China), and
different story lines. Huang Ren's 1994 book Beiqing Taiyu pian intentionally
this new conceptualization raises further
highlights "sadness" (beiqing) as a characteristic of Taiyu films, in part questions regarding other contending
dialects or languages such as Hakka in
because Taiyu films, despite their widespread popularity during the 1 960s,
Taiwan and Cantonese in Hong Kong.
had lapsed into oblivion in Taiwan since the mid-1970s. As recently as 2001, In any case, the status of Taiyu as a lan-
guage or dialect has become a debatable
Liao Jinfeng confessed that before his high school years he had never heard
issue recently. For simplicity's sake, this
of "the February 28 Incident" - the KMT's island-wide military crackdown article uses the untranslated term "Taiyu"
to maintain, in a productive way, the
on Taiwanese protesters in 1947 (M. Berry 2008: 179-249; Lin 2007) - and tension between "Taiwanese dialect" and
had never known of Taiyu films before 1989. In cases like this, sadness is "Taiwanese language" as well as all its
other related terms.
the product of repressed public memory.
To be sure, the situation had changed after the KMT government lifted 2 The KMT ("Kuomintang" or "Guomin-
dang") refers to the Nationalist Party,
martial law in July 1987. In 1991, the Chinese Taipei Film Archive started which controlled all state film studios in
publishing in its journal Film Appreciation (Dianying xinshang) a series of Taiwan from the 1950s to the 1980s (Guo-
Juin Hong 2011; Zhang 2004: 125-149).
catalogues of Taiyu films and interviews with former Taiyu filmmakers,
As the KMT government promoted Man-
and this pioneering initiative resulted in a book on Taiyu films (Guojia darin as the official language in Taiwan,
it increasingly restricted the use of Taiyu
dianying ziliaoguan 1 994). Since then, film studies has gradually developed
in public. Many professors in Taiwan
into a legitimate subject in Taiwan - albeit not quite a respected academic related to me their childhood experience
of being discouraged or penalized for
discipline yet - and several scholars (Lu 1998: 69-124; Ye 1999; Liao Jinfeng
speaking Taiyu in school, but the flourish
2001; Huang/Wang 2004: 1: 174-249, 339-405) have published books in of Taiyu films and Taiyu songs in the 1950
and 1960s, along with gezaixi, indicates
Chinese on different aspects of Taiyu films, although New Taiwan Cinema
that the KMT's restriction on Taiyu cul-
has remained the favored topic in English film scholarship. tural productions was not successful until
the 1970s and 1980s.
This essay revisits Taiyu films as an early - yet largely forgotten -
tradition during what is sometimes referred to (Guo-Juin Hong 2010: 6)
as Taiwan cinema's "missing years" (i.e., before the 1980s). Operating as
a nonofficial, "parallel" (Yeh/Davis 2005: 15-52) or "competing" cinema
(Zhang 2004: 125-142), Taiyu films developed into a community-based
but self-consciously translocal form of entertainment in the late 1950s,
and their productions quickly outnumbered "Mandarin cinema" ( guoyu
pian) in general (Jiao 1993) and "official policy films" (zhengce pian) from

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the KMT studios in particular (Huang Ren 1994Ö). From 1955 to 1959# a
total of 178 Taiyu films were produced, compared to forty-one Mandarin
films in the same period. By 1969# the total number of Taiyu productions
reached 1#052# whereas Mandarin films numbered only 373. In its best
years, Taiyu filmmakers produced 120 titles (1962), 114 (1965), and 113
(1968) (see Table 1).
Rather than offering an overview of the ups and downs of the history
of Taiyu film (Zhang 2012: 277-283), I am primarily concerned with their
articulation of sadness as a structure of feeling, a narrative strategy, and
a geopolitical vision in the 1960s. First, as a structure of feeling, sadness
both drew from and fed on the overwhelming pathos of the time when
Taiwan was undergoing a sea change from an agricultural society to an
increasingly modernized and urbanized one (Huang Jianye 2000: 359-600).
Guo-Juin Hong (2011: 54) is right in observing that "Taiwanese-dialect
melodrama cinematizes modernity as clusters of spatial and temporal
problems," but I would add gender problems (e.g., emasculated man,
female sexuality) to these clusters because the inevitable confrontation
with modernity, including the oft-staged rural-to-urban migration, had
resulted in unpredicted social and cultural consequences, in response to
which sadness emerged as a prevailing pathos. Over time, such sadness
dominant in Taiyu films during the early 1960s - profusely articulated in a
parade of "grief-stricken misfortunes, broken families, separated lovers,
wandering orphans, and miserable lives" - would give way in the late 1960s
to exuberant heteroglossia in Mikhail Bakhtin's sense of the carnivalesque
(Liao Jinfeng 2001 : 1 62), but as my analysis of two 1 969 films demonstrates,
at least inasmuch as urban melodramas are concerned, sadness continued
as a perceptible structure of feeling till then.

Second, as a narrative strategy, sadness can be traced back to several
distinct local and translocal Taiwan cultural traditions, such as gezaixi,
ballads ( geyao ), and popular songs, all performed in Taiyu. Because the
first two Taiyu films - Six Talents' Romance of the West Chamber (Liu

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caizi xixiang ji, 1955) and Xue Pinggui and Wang Baochuan (Xue Pinggui
yu Wang Baochuan, 1956) - are adaptations of gezaixi,3 its influence on 3 Whereas Six Talents' Romance of the
West Chamber had a merely three-day

early Taiyu films is unmistakable. Originating as jinge from southern Fujian
run and failed miserably, in part because
province, gezaixi developed in colonial Taiwan as early as the 1910s (Liu of its 16mm format incompatible with
most theaters (Huang Ren 1994a: 5), Xue
1999) and became extremely popular around the mid-1950s; the number
Pinggui and Wang Baochuan showed for
of its troupes soared from 160 in 1956 to 235 in 1958, representing 47.1 twenty-four days in Taipei, grossing more
than NT$300,000 (on a production cost
percent of all registered Taiwan drama troupes in 1 958 (Chen 1 988: 94-97).
of NT$250,000, excluding compensations
At one time, 367 theaters were devoted solely to gezaixi, not to mention for the cast and costumes) and paving
the way for the flourish of Taiyu films
innumerable open-air stages in villages and townships (Lu 1998: 60). With
in subsequent years (Chen 1988: 74-75).
familiar narratives, experienced casts, ready-made costumes and props, and, The rise and fall of "Kung Le Society"
(Gongle she), a predominantly female
above all, devoted local audiences, gezaixi was a gold mine for Taiyu films,
gezaixi troupe whose performance
which quickly adopted for itself the "bitter pathos" ( kuqing ) characteristic helped the film version of Xue Pinggui
and Wang Baochuan become a box-office
of gezaixi. Another popular source of material for Taiyu films was Taiwan
hit and whose master, Chen Chengsan
ballads, a narrative form that developed in the Japanese colonial era (1918-1992), was a legendary figure in
the entertainment world of gezaixi, Taiyu
and centered on characters who lament their precarious fates, long for
films, and song-and-dance ensembles
their hometowns, and miss their loved ones (Liao Jinfeng 2001: 92-93). {gewutuan) in Taiwan, is told in the docu-
mentary film The Lost Kingdom (Xiaoshi
Just as Taiyu filmmakers tapped the popularity of well-known ballads for
de wangguo: Gongle she, 1999). At the
their overwhelmingly sad narratives, so too did they incorporate popular peak of its operation, "Kung Le Society"
consisted of eight traveling troupes and
Taiyu songs of grief and misery into their melodramatic productions, with
operated a gezaixi school, but eventu-
the result that bitter songs often perform "another narrative in parallel ally it ceased operation because of the
increasing pressures from the emergent
with the image track" (Guo-Juin Hong 201 1 : 58). Taiyu films proved both
television industry and the lack of gov-
resourceful and resilient in drawing inspiration from a variety of local ernment support (Qiu 2001).
cultural media and practices.

Third, as a geopolitical vision, Taiyu films developed sadness as their
most distinctive feature grounded in the spatial, temporal, and linguistic
specificity of Taiwan. Historically, the widespread usage of Taiyu posed a
serious challenge to the KMT's policy on promoting Mandarin as national
language. The KMT attempted to ban gezaixi as early as 1 950, but because
of its growing popularity they shifted their policy instead toward regulating
and reforming the genre (Lu 1998: 61). These efforts were largely fruitless
given the emergence of Taiyu films by the mid-1950s. In these films, as in

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gezaixi, sadness seemed to flow naturally through Taiyu to their audiences,
who took pride when they heard an ancient Chinese emperor speak Taiyu
rather than Mandarin. For the Taiwanese, who were mostly powerless and
voiceless in political and symbolic representation under both the Japanese
and the KMT# the pathos of sadness in Taiyu films was doubly significant
because it constituted a popular outlet for repressed feelings and an
alternative expression of locally grounded identity - alternative at least
to the heroic and patriotic narrative in Mandarin films.
The relevance of the KMT policy and the gezaixi tradition points to
three crucial frames of reference in my cultural contextualization of Taiyu
films - Mandarin cinema, Xiayu films, and Japanese cinema. First, the
geopolitical grounding of sadness in Taiyu films comes into focus when we
examine the contemporary state-sponsored Mandarin productions, where
sadness was definitely not a dominant pathos. For example, Children of
the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi zisun, 1955), a rare state production that
switched its original dialogue from Mandarin to Taiyu (though it was
4 Huang Ren 2003: 127-136. Director Bai also available in a separate Mandarin version),4 interpellates all ethnic
Ke (1914-1964) was born in Xiamen,
Chinese spectators - regardless of their geographic origins (Taiwanese or
studied filmmaking in Nanning and
Nanjing, went to work at Diantong Film Mainlanders) or chosen residences (e.g., overseas in Singapore) - into an
Company in Shanghai and served as
acknowledgment and celebration of their common ancestry in central
assistant to Yuan Muzhi (1909-1978) on
two leftist features the latter directed. China. True, in its operatic and realistic modes of representation (Guo-
Children of Troubled Times (Fengyun
Juin Hong 2011: 33-63), Children of Yellow Emperor showcases rich local
ernü, 1934) and Cityscape (Dushi feng-
guang, 1935). Bai became the Head of theater traditions (e.g., gezaixi and shadow puppet) and tourist sites in
the KMT-controlled Taiwan Studio in
both Taipei and southern Taiwan, but its identification with the official
1945, wrote film reviews, and directed
several Taiyu films in the 1950s, includ- Sinocentric rhetoric makes the film essentially a propaganda piece aimed
ing Faking Madness for Eighteen Years
at educating the Taiyu audience about the intimate ties between Taiwan
(Fengnü shiba nian, 1957), for which
he also wrote the script. He reportedly and mainland China in terms of "blood lineage, history, culture, custom,
spoke Mandarin, Taiyu, Cantonese, and
and religion," as expounded in a contemporary film review (in Huang Ren
Shanghainese. Tragically, he became
a victim of the White Terror in 1962 2003: 129). As for the majority of official Mandarin productions of the 1950s,
and was executed by the KMT in 1964
the obsession with "reclaiming mainland China" ( fangong dalu) prevented
(Huang Ren 2003: 92-94, 135).
any sustained exploration of issues grounded in Taiwan (Huang Ren 1 994b:

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61-81). Ironically, by the time a handful of state studios, especially CMPC
(Central Motion Picture Company or Zhongying), launched the "healthy
realism" (jiankang xieshi) genre in the mid-1960s, the sadness that had
been deliberately repressed in state productions would occasionally find
echoes in Mandarin films. The specter of sadness would haunt Mandarin
productions of native soil stories in the 1970s, and it would be reinstated
eventually - albeit in a drastically different film language - in New Taiwan
Cinema of the 1980s, which gradually but decisively brought Taiyu back to
Taiwan cinemas and to international audiences.5 5 The haunting presence of sadness is
best illustrated in the films of Li Xing (b.
Second, revisiting Taiyu films would be incomplete without considering
1930), who began his career by directing
the translocal or transregional flows of Taiyu entertainment products Taiyu
in films such as Brothers Wang and
Liu Touring Taiwan (Wangge Liuge you
the 1950s and 1960s. Historically, Taiyu films emerged as a local reaction to
Taiwan, 1958), made his reputation with
the popularity of Xiayu films (Xiayu pian or Amoy-dialect films) in Taiwan
Mandarin healthy realism films such as
Oyster Girl (Kenü, 1963), and continued
during the mid-1950s (Ye 1999: 60-61). Produced in Hong Kong as early
with native soil films such as He Never
as 1947 and distributed mostly for overseas screening in Southeast Asian
Gives Up (Wangyang zhongde yitiao
chuan, 1978). See Huang Ren 1999.
countries, Xiayu films reached Taiwan first in 1949 and were promoted as
"authentic" (zhengzong) Taiyu films in the early 1950s.6 However, within
6 The earliest known Xiayu film dates to
1933, and two more productions based
five years of Xiayu films' peak popularity in Taiwan in the mid-1 950s, Taiyu
on southern Fujian folk tales came out
films managed to garner the "authentic" status and won the battleinfor
1936 (Hong Buren 2002), but Xiayu
the local market.7 films disappeared during the ensuing
war years and did not revive until their
To borrow Jeremy Taylor's characterization (2009: 250) of Xiayu films Hong Kong phase in the late 1940s. For a
complete list of 243 Xiayu films and their
of the 1950s, by the late 1960s, Taiyu films became "a cinema at home
screenings in the Philippines, Singapore,
with appropriating elements of other entertainment industries," although and Taiwan from 1948 to 1966, see Wu
2012: 206-259. For more elaboration of
both cinemas were "still clearly anchored to a very specific 'imagined
Xiayu films, see Taylor 2011. The Hong
community'" - the community of Minnanyu-speaking people across Kong Film Archive organized a retrospec-
tive of Xiayu films in conjunction with
Southeast Asia. Like Xiayu films, Taiyu films "may have been nominally
the Hong Kong International Film Festival
defined by a particular dialect, but they developed their own traditions, in spring 2012.
practices, and signatures" (Taylor 2009: 250). Following the example of

7 According to one estimate (Ye 1999:
Xiayu films of the early 1 950s, Taiyu films succeeded in articulating sadness 81-83), twenty-three Xiayu films were
exhibited in Taiwan in 1955, thirty-seven
as a structure of feeling and a narrative strategy. However, unlike Xiayu
in 1956, twenty-six in 1957, thirteen
films, which thrived in a deterritorialized fashion in diasporic Chinese in 1958, twenty-four in 1959, and only

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one - the last one - in 1960 (see Table communities across Southeast Asia and eventually declined when newly
2). Even in 1956, when Xiayu films were
independent nation-states such as Malaysia, especially in their initial
three times of the number of Taiyu films
in exhibition, Taiyu films accounted for postcolonial years in the 1 960s# started to reassert their control over ethnic
seven (including number one) of the
and linguistic affairs,8 Taiyu films were able to present a geopolitical vision
ten top-grossing domestic films (i.e.,
Chinese-language productions, includ- grounded in Taiwan while at the same time maintaining, at least through
ing those from Hong Kong) in Taiwan
the 1960s, translocal flows of their products both inside and outside Taiwan.
(Ye 1999: 79).
In the long run, this flexible "translocality" (Zhang 2011) based on the
8 Jeremy Taylor (2011: 11, 123) argues
geographically anchored and historically-complicated Taiwan experience
that the Amoy-dialect film industry
"belonged to no single city, nation or, may have laid the foundation for the unprecedented revival of Taiyu culture
indeed, 'place,'" and ultimately "it was
in Taiwan in the 1990s and 2000s. As Taylor (2008: 72-73) observes of 1990s
the disconnection between Amoy-
dialect cinema and any given nation- Taiwan, "the melancholic khau-tiau-a - inherited from the opera films of
state ... which led to this industry being
the 1950s and perfected in the 'hybrid songs' of the 1960s - began to be
unsustainable from the early 1960s
onward, and largely forgotten in a viewed by nativist intellectuals and politicians as an expression of Taiwanese
world defined by nation-states and the
relations between them."
anguish after years of oppression under Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists.
Only enka melodies were believed to be sufficiently heart-wrenching to
9 The term khau-tiau-a (or kudiaozi) fully express Taiwanese suffering."9
means the "tune of crying" associ-
Third, Taylor's reference to enka hints that Japan remained a major
ated with Taiyu and Xiayu folk culture,
whereas enka are melodies originated source of influence on Taiyu films, an influence often hidden in public
from Japan. I avoid using another ro-
discourse but palpable in the audiovisual tracks of 1960s Taiyu films. As
manization system for Taiyu pronuncia-
tion so as not to confuse it with the Ye Longyan's research indicates (1999: 206-234), Taiwan audiences of the
by-now standard pinyin romanization.
1950s and 1960s generally preferred Hollywood and Japanese films over
Taiyu films, although age, class, education, and geography were factors
in film taste. For example, the older generation favored Japanese films,
whereas working-class people in central and southern Taiwan found
Taiyu films more "congenial" (q/nq/e), despite their low production
value. According to Chun-chi Wang (2012), although Japanese films were
periodically banned as a result of the volatile diplomatic relations between
Taiwan and Japan during the Cold War, Taiyu films consistently drew on
inspirations from Japanese film melodrama but often substantially altered
plot and characterization to express cultural values specific to the context
of contemporary Taiwan.

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With the cultural context in place, I now turn to an explanation of my
main objectives for this essay. First, methodologically, because with one
noticeable exception (Guo-Juin Hong 2011) very little English scholarship
pays attention to Taiyu films in any detail, I offer a close textual analysis
of representative works from the 1960s to illustrate the complexity of
Taiyu films and to retrieve lost voices and repressed memories buried in
this once forgotten cinema. Almost all selected films fall in the genre of
melodrama, which tends to polarize good and evil, heighten dramatic
tension, explore ethical dilemmas, and generate emotional responses - all
these features compatible with the persistent articulation of sadness.10 We 10 My selection is, of course, conditioned
by the availability of Taiyu films in video
should recall that melodrama was the most productive genre in mediating
format. For a partial list of available Taiyu
gender and modernity in Hollywood, Japan, and Shanghai (Hansen 2000; films at the Chinese Taipei Film Archive,
see Liao Jinfeng 2001: 218-225; more
Lowy 2007; Singer 2001). It is my contention that Taiyu films' articulation films have been added to the archive
of sadness is accomplished through gendering space in a time of rapid since the publication of Liao's book.
social transformation, and for that reason I examine their construction

of conflicting spatialities between nation and family, city and country,
modernity and tradition, femininity and masculinity. All these categories
are problematized to add substance and significance to the overwhelming
pathos of sadness in Taiyu films and to establish a distinctive precedence
in Taiwan film history.
Second, theoretically, I endorse a recent effort in cultural studies

to question the validity of a center-periphery binary in the study of
geopolitically marginal cultures and to recognize the limits of the
oppositional and resistant model. I explore the potential gains in cultural
agency when we reenvision a place such as Taiwan as a node within a larger
network of transnational, transregional, and translocal flows. Operating as
a node that facilitated a model of translation and transformation in cultural
production (a model I elaborate on in the conclusion), Taiyu films could be

reimagined, in Chun-chi Wang's words (2012: 77, 98), as "a product of the
syncretism" that "takes a bit of everything, mixes it, and creates something
unique." However, I prefer the word "distinctive" to "unique" in describing

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the kind of tradition Taiyu films established in the 1 960s, for neither is the
sadness in question unique to Taiyu films, as Taylor's study of Xiayu films
has demonstrated, nor is the mediation of gender and space exclusive to
Taiyu films, because similar mediations had already taken place in other
cinemas through the first half of the twentieth century. To understand
what is distinctive in the model of translation and transformation in Taiyu
films in the 1960s, we need to investigate their specific tactics of alteration,
mediation, and negotiation, as I do in what follows.
Almost Beheaded: Endangerment of the Nation/Family

The first film I consider is The Opium l/l/ar(Yapian zhanzheng, 1963), based
on the familiar story of the late Qing hero Lin Zexu, an Emperor-appointed
governor of Guangdong and Guangxi (liangguang zongdu) who defied
the British imperialist power and banned the opium trade in Guangzhou
in the mid-nineteenth century. Directed by Li Quanxi (b. 1926), a popular
11 Newspaper readers in 1965 voted Li and prolific Taiyu director,11 the film differs significantly from two earlier
Quanxi as one of the ten best directors
Mandarin films on the same subject: Eternity (Wanshi liufang, 1943) and
in Taiwan. For a period of three years,
he shot three films a month, and he Lin Zexu (Lin Zexu, 1959). Li Quanxi'sfilm does not indulge in the romantic
could turn out two films per month,
interests of the former, a Shanghai-Manchuria wartime coproduction that
including postproduction. He is credited
with twenty-one titles in 1962 alone sought to demonize Britain and to align China with Japan in the anti-
(Guojia dianying ziliaoguan 1994: 53-77;
imperialist struggle; nor does it exhibit the patriotism and heroism of the
Ye 1999: 189-195). In comparison, Xin
Qi, another prolific Taiyu director, was latter, a Chinese socialist production that presents the Opium War as a tragic
credited with fourteen films in 1969
episode in modern Chinese history.12 To heighten the pathos of sadness
(Guojia dianying ziliaoguan 1994: 163).
typical of Taiyu films, The Opium War constructs the spaces of the nation/
12 More recently, Xie Jin (1923-2008)
family (guojia) as both gendered as female or feminine and endangered by
directed The Opium War (Yapian zhan-
zheng, 1997), a spectacular propaganda foreign powers and addictive drugs. Seen from this perspective, the most
film released in time for the handover
prominent gendered and endangered figure in the film is Wang Lilan, an
of Hong Kong to mainland China in July
1997. itinerant blind female singer whose sorrowful songs create an ambience
of sadness and whose precarious fate heightens a sense of endangerment.
No scene better illustrates the endangerment in question than the
execution scene. Because the local drug-smuggling ring has placed opium

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in Lilan's yueqin (a traditional Chinese musical instrument) when she
travels to work from an islet to the city, she is arrested in a government
raid, paraded on the streets with drug dealers, and sentenced to death
by public beheading. The protracted climactic scene crosscuts between
the execution ground on a hillside where convicted opium dealers are
beheaded and the sequences involving Ailan's effort to appeal to Lin Zexu
for a retrial on behalf of her wrongly accused sister. Exactly at the moment
when the executioner raises his sharp blade over Lilan's head (fig. 1), Ailan
arrives on horseback with an officer to announce the commuting of Lilan's
sentence. The crosscutting between the preparation for the execution
and the rescue sequence intensifies the sense of endangerment, all the
way to the hair-raising moment when Lilan, kneeling beside two headless
Figure 1. Female victimization in Opium War (1963): an innocent, homeless blind singer is
almost beheaded for a crime beyond her vision.

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corpses, is almost beheaded - a moment that graphically illustrates female
victimization because the viewer has known all along that Lilan is innocent.
Linking endangerment and victimization thus enhances the overwhelming
pathos of sadness in the film.
The articulation of sadness in The Opium War goes hand in hand with
the gendering of spaces and characters associated with certain spaces. First,
the teahouse is rendered as a contact zone where the contending nations
stake their claims over the rights to trade in opium and women. When Lilan
first appears in the film, she is singing in a teahouse where she is sexually
harassed by an arrogant British merchant who covets her body and pinches
her face. When Ailan intervenes to protect her younger sister, the merchant
grabs her and, in the ensuing confrontation with an undercover Chinese
officer, shoots Ailan in the chest. Obviously, the British violation of Chinese
women in this dramatic scene is meant to represent the endangerment of
the Chinese nation, and such endangerment continues throughout the film
when opium-smoking is revealed to ruin the Chinese home, another sacred
space that is constructed as endangered in the film. As if to give visual form
to the lyrics in Lilan's song against opium-smoking - "Sever your ties with
drugs and opium, / because they harm people badly, / scare relatives and
friends, / ruin families and cause deaths, /turning smokers into beggars"-
the film cuts to an addicted father who used to be a millionaire but who
has lost his farmland and his house because of drug addiction. The space
of family in ruin is foregrounded as the homeless father tries to sell his
wife and four children next to a local temple. The sense of homelessness
is reinforced when the wife roams the streets in search of her son, with
her young daughters crying miserably for their elder brother, who by then
has been sold into the opium ring. With Lilan's song commenting on the
sadness of family separation, the father is later seen running through the
countryside, only to discover that his heartbroken wife has hanged herself
on a tree, leaving behind a note blaming him for being "more brutal than
an animal." It is only with Lin Zexu's intervention that the father is saved

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from jumping over the cliff and killing himself, and from that point on he is
determined to kick the habit and start a new life with his younger children.
The interconnected stories of a rescued blind singer and a rehabilitated
opium addict conceptualize the Chinese nation/family as feminized and
victimized: not only are Chinese women harassed and injured by the British
merchant but the addicted father now carries his youngest daughter on his
back while selling vegetables on the street (public roles typically associated
with women) (fig. 2). It is precisely through such a combined strategy of
feminization and victimization - the singer and the addict both victims
of the British opium trade - that the film presents the gendered space of
the Chinese nation/family as endangered. Not even the public burning
of more than twenty thousand boxes of opium seems to boost patriotic
spirits for long; Lin Zexu is fully aware that the impending war with the
Figure 2. Endangerment of nation/family in Opium War( 1963): a rehabilitated opium addict

carries his youngest daughter on his back while selling vegetables on the street.

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British will jeopardize China and forever change its history. "The evil force
is coming" - with this dire prediction, the film ends, outdated Chinese
cannons firing at the approaching modern gunboats.
Why does The Opium War pursue such a narrative of endangerment
and downplay the familiar story of Lin Zexu as a glorified national hero?
True, the film still depicts Lin's courageous actions of banning, confiscating,
and burning British opium, but in line with the strategy of feminizing space,
even Lin is sent to a pleasure house where he is offered the companionship
of a prostitute. The double strategy of feminization and endangerment,
I would suggest, constitutes a subtle challenge to the KMT discourse of
nationalism: through its melodramatic presentation of suffering in the
gendered and endangered spaces of the nation/family, the film saturates
the otherwise familiar narrative of anti-imperialism with overwhelming
sadness. Moreover, sadness here functions as a mechanism of identification
with the local and a means of disarticulation from the national (or at least
the official). In a superimposed, extra-diegetic conclusion, we see a KMT
officer denouncing the mainland Communist regime of "Mao-Zhu bandits"
for allegedly growing opium in the people's communes and ruining their
health, but this denouncement sounds discordant with the intense diegetic
experience of suffering and sadness in the film proper, which is vividly
present when Lilan's sad song is played on the sound track against the
black screen near the end. Diegetically, then, The Opium War, like many
other Taiyu films of the time, evokes an alternative vision of the nation/
family grounded more in Taiwan than in mainland China.
Two other tropes embodied by the itinerant blind singer deserve more
attention. First, Lilan as the central figure of the endangered nation/family
is made to endure nonstop suffering, and her "homeless" status - she leaves
her hometown in search of a cure for her blindness- suggests an allegory
of the lost homeland in 1960s Taiwan, both to the mainlanders who were
forced to relocate to Taiwan and to the Taiwanese who believed their
homeland had been taken over by the KMT regime. Second, Lilan's blindness

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represents a kind of innocence open to manipulation and distortion by
foreign forces: she is almost beheaded for a crime literally beyond her
vision; her blindness compels her to express herself through singing, and
she ultimately proves to be more perceptive than many other characters in
the film. When the boy is sold by his opium-addicted father and is confined
in a dark room, Lilan verbalizes his suffering with her lyrics: "Seaside winds
blow in my face /and make mesad/. . . Oh mom! Do you know /your son
is suffering here, / waiting for a savior to come / and rescue me from the
bitter sea." Again, like his father, the boy is feminized as a helpless victim
here and relies on the female voice to articulate his sadness. Intertwined
with homelessness and blindness, sadness is constructed simultaneously

as a structure of feeling, a narrative strategy, and a geopolitical vision in
The Opium War.
Double-Faced: Contradictory Embodiment of Urban Modernity

The tropes of homelessness and blindness in The Opium War are similarly
employed in The Early Train from Taipei (Taibei fade zaoche, 1964), in
which a male farmer named Huotu (Chen Yang) travels to Taipei in search
of his lover, Huang Xiulan (Bai Lan), and tragically loses his eyesight after
being beaten by local gangsters. Urban space in this film is deliberately
configured as the source of degradation, devastation, and death; it is
where the female lead, Huang Xiulan, who comes from the apparently
idyllic countryside, is seduced, violated, and eventually incarcerated. Lost
in the alienating city, where age-old rural values are meaningless vis-à-
vis the omnipresence of urban modernity, the doomed lovers are torn
apart physically and emotionally and are condemned to a life of captivity,
disability, and poverty.
The trope of homelessness is clearly visualized when Huotu, after
losing his sight, gropes his way along a busy street and is almost hit by an
oncoming car; formerly an able-bodied farm worker, he is now disabled
(thus figuratively feminized), homeless (i.e., dislocated from his hometown

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community), and dependent on the mercy of random passersby who donate
small change while he plays a flute on the streets (an act comparable to
Lilan's singing in the teahouse in The Opium War). Near the end of the
film, Huotu finds his way to the prison where Xiulan is incarcerated. (After
getting her drunk and raping her when she was unconscious, a nightclub
owner kept her as a mistress and locked her in an apartment. Later, she
killed him with a pair of scissors she intended to use to commit suicide. In
the struggle that ensued, she also killed the nightclub owner's bodyguard
and was herself disfigured by nitric acid.) In the prison yard, the blind
Huotu and the disfigured Xiulan have a tearful reunion that heightens their
mutual realization of homelessness and blindness. "I'm a ghost woman,"
Xiulan sobs as Huotu's hand feels the scars on her face. "I love you no
matter what," Huotu reaffirms his love, "and I'll wait for you to come back."
To be sure, the prison is only one of several alienating urban spaces in
The Early Train from Taipei. Another such space is the courtroom, where
Xiulan is retried in an attempt to overturn her original death sentence. The
courtroom represents a new institution of modernity that alienates simple-
minded people like Xiulan. Rather than assisting in the male lawyer's effort
to vindicate her on the grounds of sexual exploitation and involuntary
confinement, Xiulan openly admits to killing the two men and readily
accepts a life sentence. When her mother comes to visit her in the prison,
the iron bars divide them and visually emphasize the family separation.
Surely, the film's extensive dwelling on the courtroom and prison scenes
is meant in part to amplify the pathos of sadness and in part to educate
13 According to Liao Jinfeng (2001: the 1 960s audience about the modern legal system.13 But I would contend
155-160), similar scenes of courtroom
dramas are found in A Heartbreak-
that although Xiulan's willing submission to her "fate" by accepting the
ing Night on May 13 (Wuyue shisan sentence from the male judge as a new symbolic father may have reduced
shangxin ye, 1965).
the impact of her previous patricidal act (i.e., killing the evil nightclub
owner), her refusal to cooperate fully in the legal procedure implies a
fundamental suspicion of these modern institutions.
To a considerable extent, both the courtroom and the prison are
16 • Articulating Sadness, Gendering Space

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gendered as male spaces where female characters are ruthlessly subject
to interrogation, surveillance, and punishment. The image of Xiulan as
a convicted criminal in the city therefore forms a striking contrast to
her previously attractive image as an innocent country maiden in her
hometown. The contradictory images of Xiulan are embodied in her two
portraits painted by a male painter, who first captures Xiulan's untainted
beauty in the natural surroundings of her home village, with a creek, a
bridge, and willow trees decorating the idyllic scene. When the painter
learns of Xiulan's fate in the newspaper three years later, he visits her in
prison and seeks her permission to paint her disfigured face. As represented
by the painter's two portraits, Xiulan appears double-faced , both a pretty
angel and an ugly devil (fig. 3). Upon closer scrutiny, the double-face
configuration serves not only as an intriguing device to explore female
Figure 3. Double-faced woman in The Early Train from Taipei (1964): a male painter recounts
the tragic urban degradation of a country maiden.

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degradation but also to highlight the contradictory male imagination of
woman in Taiyu films in general (as we also see in more examples that
follow): whereas the fair maiden represents the deep-seated nostalgia for
a lost - or at least eroded - space of rural beauty and female virtues, the
hideous prisoner alludes to the deceptive and destructive space of urban
modernity.
The train station in the film is invested with similar contradictory
significance. As a quintessential modern public space, the train station
promises to be the beginning of a hopeful journey and the destination of
a rewarding trip, but the film refigures it instead as a space of separation
and sadness, a space of missed reunion. When Huotu visits Taipei for the
first time and discovers that his beloved country maiden has turned into
a "degraded" nightclub dancer associated with all the trappings of urban
modernity (e.g., high heels, fashionable dress and hairdos, rich male
patrons, late-night work shifts) (fig. 4), he cannot bring himself to bare
his feelings to her directly and instead resorts to leaving a note and asking
her to return home and "live a simple life." Repeated shots of a clock - a
modern device indicative of the forever progressive advancing of time
away from the crisis-ridden present to the unforeseeable future - quicken
the fluctuation of the lovers' mixed emotions and hint at the inevitability
of their sorrowful separation: 3:40 p.m., Huotu starts waiting patiently in
Xiulan's empty apartment; 2:25 a.m., she returns from the nightclub in a
luxury car; 4:30 a.m., Huotu writes the note; 5:05 a.m., Xiulan takes a taxi
to the station and looks for Huotu in the train carriages at 5:10 a.m. The
profound sadness is articulated not in their face-to-face dialogue but in
their sorrowful singing in separate frames: Huotu sings of his suspicion
as he walks toward the station; Xiulan sings of her yearning for Huotu's
understanding as she enters the station platform and searches the train
to Kaohsiung. After Huotu hides from Xiulan, the train departs (at 5:20
a.m.), carrying their sadness along.
This intentionally missed reunion in The Early Train from Taipei is

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Figure 4. Two troubled lovers in The Early Train from Taipei (1964): Xiulan (Bai Lan) pleads for
understanding from Huotu (Chen Yang).
reminiscent of a comparable scene in the film's companion piece, The Last

Train from Kaohsiung (Gaoxiong fade weibanche, 1 963)# where Cuicui (Bai
Lan)# a country maiden, arrives too late to catch the 10:30 p.m. train to
Taipei with her lover, Zhongyi (Chen Yang), an urban student visiting her
village. Again, the repeated shots of a clock provide a visual clue to the
characters' anxiety. At 9:45 p.m., Cuicui sneaks out of her house when her
father falls asleep and rides on an ox-drawn cart, which breaks down on the
way (fig. 5). At 10:1 5 p.m., Zhongyi waits restlessly at the station and, like
Huotu in The Early Train from Taipei , his feeling of sadness is expressed in a
male voice singing of an impending separation; at 10:25 p.m., Cuicui's bus
arrives and she rushes to the platform just as Zhongyi enters his carriage.
The lovers miss each other in sadness. In The Last Train from Kaohsiung,
as in The Early Train from Taipei, the train station functions as a public

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Figure 5. A missed reunion in The Last Train from Kaohsiung (1963): Cuicui (Bai Lan) falls
from an ox cart and fails to catch a train with her lover.
space invested with private emotions, and this distinctive configuration

transforms the station, which normally takes on the masculine associations
of modern technology, into a feminine space of sadness where both male
and female characters are compelled to articulate their repressed feelings.
Significantly, in The Early Train from Taipei, the feminine or feminized
space of the train station finds echoes in the shared rhythm of the lovers'
sad tune and lyrics:
Huoto: "Going home, my heart broken, my heart broken . . . Oh,

the early train from Taipei makes my thoughts confused."
Xiulan: "Where are you, my man, please understand me, please

understand me . . . Oh, the early train from Taipei makes my heart
saddened."
What is significant here is that unlike The Opium War, which expresses t
feelings of male characters through Lilan's singing, the male lead in Th
Early Train from Taipei intones his own voice of sadness and thus form

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sentimental dialogue with the female singing - a dialogue that inevitably
surrounds the male character with the feminine quality in terms of what
Laura Mulvey (1986) theorizes as the object of the gaze in cinematic
technology. Although I agree that, as Wang Junqi (2010) contends, Taiyu
films may not have observed the Hollywood convention of the dominant
male gaze and instead preferred the structuring of parallel male and female
"to-be-looked-at-ness," what is of interest here is that the male singing of
sadness in The Early Train from Taipei finds echoes in other contemporary
Taiyu films. In Lingering Passions (Jiuqing mianmian, 1962), for instance,
Mr. Hong, a school music teacher, is separated by force from his young wife,
Yuxia (Bai Rong), in the picturesque Ali Mountains and travels to Taipei
to become a professional singer.14 Both in his image in advertising posters 14 Mr. Hong is played by the contempo-
rary popular Taiyu singer Hong Yifeng
and in his stage performances, Hong is the object of the public gaze as well
(1927-2010). The ups and downs in Hong
as the voice of profound sadness. Not surprisingly, it is through his voice Yifeng's life are restaged in a documen-
tary, Aba (2011), directed by his son Hung
that his estranged wife is drawn back to him four years later, listening to
Jung-Liang (Hong Rongliang).
him first on the radio and then in the theater, and it is likewise through
his poster image that his long-lost and homeless daughter finds him inside
the theater (fig. 6), where the family of three is reunited in tears.
It is illuminating to compare the fates of male and female singers in
Lingering Old Passions and The Last Train from Kaohsiung. In the former,
the successful male singer is awarded with a bittersweet family reunion,
whereas in the latter, the successful female singer is punished with an
unnamed disease and untimely death. Among other reasons, class plays
an important role in meting out respective fates for different characters:
whereas the schoolteacher is given the chance to make his name in Taipei,
the country maiden's fame is terminated even though her lover has severed
ties with his status-conscious parents and has moved in with her in a poor
district. In a rather clichéd resolution, the female singer gives in to the Figure 6. The male to-be-looked-at-ness
in Lingering Passions (1962): the long lost
demand of her lover's wealthy parents - albeit refusing their offer of
daughter recognizes his singer father on
200,000 yuan in compensation and thus showing what Huang Ren (2006: a poster outside a theater.
114) described in a contemporary review as "a strong sense of agency in

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the younger generation" - and takes on the airs of a flirtatious, unfaithful
seductress to drive her lover back to his parents' mansion. Remarkably,
before she dies, the singer asks her lover's cousin Meiqi - her former
rival - to replace her and thus performs another ritual of self-sacrifice. With
this voluntary replacement, the triangulation of love affairs between two
competing women is structurally folded into one pair of lovers legitimized
by their wealthy parents.
The tales of sadness - enhanced by the typical melodramatic plot twists
of separation, misunderstanding, and female sacrifice - involving country
maidens in The Last Train from Kaohsiung and The Early Train from Taipei
are loaded with patriarchal values. Despite their spatial affiliation with the
idyllic countryside, the female leads in both films are given double faces
and become contradictory embodiments of urban modernity - they are
attractive because of their beauty, virtues, and talents and yet at the same
time dangerous because of their dubious urban professions (as a dancer
and a singer). For their transgressive acts (respectively, killing a sexually
possessive male nightclub owner and almost derailing the career path of
a rich young man), they are severely punished in both films: Xiulan the
dancer is not only disfigured but also incarcerated, and Cuicui the singer
suddenly collapses during her television performance and subsequently
dies of an undisclosed disease. Such tragic endings betray a fundamental
male apprehension of urban modernity, which takes on a double-faced,
gendered embodiment as an alluring yet destructive femme fatale.
Feminine Visions: From Male Suffering to Female Investigation

The male phobia of the femme fatale as a contradictory embodiment of
urban modernity that is implicit in The Last Train from Kaohsiung and The
Early Train from Taipei finds a striking articulation in Steaming Rouzong
(Shao rouzong, 1969). In the film, an extraordinary gender reversal takes
place whereby Huang Zhiming (Yang Ming), an emotionally emasculated
husband, is condemned to suffer a seemingly endless round of humiliation

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and degradation, until in the end his wrongly accused wife comes to his
rescue. The film's dramatic beginning splits the double-faced type into
two characters - the innocent wife and the scheming mistress. Zhiming's
sexy mistress, Qiuman, conspires with her lover, Ma, to frame Zhiming's
wife by knocking her unconscious, stripping off her outer clothing, and
leaving men's underwear on her bed. When Zhiming enters the bedroom
and notices someone escaping out the open window, he is deceived into
believing that his wife has been having an affair with another man.15 15 The film's original title is The Trouble
after Dropping the Underwear (Tuoku
The logic of the male phobia is so persistent in the film that Qiuman, the
fengbo), which was taken from a
seductress whose half-naked upper body is shown in dark profile in her contemporary newspaper report on an
extramarital affair but which did not pass
bedroom in her first appearance, must be punished by death when she
the film censors. The original script is
later abandons her male accomplice, Ma, for a more powerful gangster reprinted in Huang Ren 2005: 175-217.
boss. Ma sneaks into her bathroom and stabs her to death when she is
taking a shower; the rapid crosscutting between the close-ups of Qiuman's

horrified eyes and Ma's revengeful look in this murder scene evokes the
famous shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and dramatizes
both the male phobia of and obsession with the transgressive female body.
Unlike The Last Train from Kaohsiung and The Early Train from Taipei
discussed in the preceding section, Steaming Rouzong does not seem to
be concerned with female misery and concentrates on male suffering
instead. After kicking his wife out of the house, Zhiming loses his fortune
to his conspiring mistress, Qiuman, and is forced to take up physical labor
to support his three young children. Just as Huotu becomes blind in the
destructive city, Zhiming is disabled in an accident at work and, his right
arm crippled, can only eke out a meager living by selling rouzong (rouzong
is a large, pyramid-shaped dumpling made of glutinous rice wrapped
with small pieces of meat inside bamboo or reed leaves) on the street.
The pathos reaches a climax when Zhiming, hawking his goods along the
alleyways on a rainy night, discovers that his young daughter Xiujuan,
rather than doing her school homework, has also been selling rouzong to
support the impoverished family (fig. 7). The high-angle long shot frames

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Figure 7. Male suffering in Bamboo Wrapped Meat Dumplings (1969): the disabled father
and his young daughter are caught in heavy rains while selling rouzong at night.
the two miserable characters facing each other in a speechless moment

their shadowy figures dimly lit by the street lamps in the narrow alleyway.
Sadness likewise penetrates the screen when in an earlier scene Zhiming
abandons his baby daughter at a rich family's entrance gate and his two
other children burst into the house to reclaim their sibling. After many such
incidents of male suffering, the police inform Zhiming that all along he
has mistakenly blamed his innocent wife. What is ironic for the suffering
husband is that in the end he must be rescued - at least financially - by his
estranged wife# who has built up a successful small business in the south
and who is happily reunited with her husband and three children.
The reappearance of the wife at the end suggests the possibility
that the film's narrative may come from a feminine vision, which projects
an alternative scenario when the virtuous wife is no longer holding
the patriarchal family together. The alternative outcome is a series of

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disasters: not only is the deceiving/deceived husband forced to suffer the
consequences of his blind jealousy and double standard regarding his own
sexual behavior, but he is proven incapable of providing for his children.
By showcasing male suffering as pathos of sadness, the film categorically
makes the irresponsible husband a feminized and disabled figure. As in The
Opium War (when the addicted father tries to rehabilitate himself into a
responsible family man after his wife's suicide) and Lingering Passions (when
the schoolteacher raises his daughter as a single father after his wife is
taken away from him), the image of a middle-aged man carrying a baby on
his back appears in this film (fig. 8). Apart from soliciting female sympathy,
such images work to alter, visually and conceptually, the gendered space of
the family and the gendered notion of parenthood in Taiyu films.
Figure 8. A caring father in Lingering Passions (1962): Hong Yifeng is rocking his baby
daughter to sleep after his wife has been taken away from him.

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Whereas Steaming Rouzong, like Lingering Passions, still manages
to conclude the story of male suffering with a happy family reunion
endorsed by patriarchy, Bride from Hell (Diyu xinniang, 1965) questions
such patriarchal values in a radically different way. Similar to Zhiming
in Steaming Rouzong , Wang Yiming (Ke Junxiong) in Bride from Hell
is an irresponsible husband who apparently cares less about his wife's
disappearance or possible death than about his new love interest - a
neighbor's fashionably dressed young wife. One obvious difference
between the two irresponsible husbands is that whereas Zhiming is crippled
and impoverished, Yiming is wealthy and lives in a luxurious mansion that
nonetheless degenerates into the titular "hell" after the disappearance of
Yiming's wife, Bai Ruiyun.
Billed as a "horror/romance" (kongbu aiqing) film and adapted from
Mistress of Mellyn (Milan furen), a popular American novel by Victoria
Holt published in 1960 and translated into Chinese in 1961 (Lin/Wang
2012: 1-2), Bride from Hell offers abundant gothic, indeed hellish, images
(Huang Ren 2006: 197-199). As the film begins, a man's body is found by
the seashore and a woman's handbag is located on an abandoned yacht,
with the implication that the case might be a double love suicide. Yiming's
mansion is said to be haunted since Ruiyun's disappearance, and Ah Lan,
the house manager's sad-looking granddaughter who wanders around and
sings a sorrowful song and who repeatedly claims that her "lady boss" is
still alive, enhances the film's ghostly and mysterious ambience.
The mystery calls for investigation, but what is unique in Bride from
Hell is that it eclipses the male vision and highlights female investigation.
Rather than delivering the female as the object of the male gaze, the film
alternates between two feminine visions that intensify the mystery and
propel the detective narrative forward. First, when Bai Ruimei (Jin Mei),
who travels from Singapore and disguises herself as a private teacher to
investigate her sister Ruiyun's disappearance in the haunted mansion, is
introduced to Ah Lan, the camera lingers on the slow pace of the young

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girl's ghostly movement through a narrow hallway. With the contrast of her
dark shadows on the white wall, the film suggests that Ah Lan is spying on
Ruimei, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the disappeared mistress of
the house. At the same time, however, Ah Lan's ghostly movement in and
around the mansion is under surveillance, often by Ruimei, a perspective
that is emphasized through the use of point of view shots. The encounter
between these two investigative feminine visions generates a shocking
moment when one night, noticing a light in her sister's room, which is off-
limits to anyone in the household, Ruimei tiptoes to the door and peeks
Figure 9. Female investigation in Bride
through the keyhole; she beholds an eyeball staring right at her (fig. 9),
from the Hell (1965): Ruimei (Jin Mei)
screams in utter terror (fig. 10), and faints on the floor. It is only days later peeks into the keyhole and sees an
eyeball staring right at her.
that Ruimei comes to learn that Ah Lan occasionally visits Ruiyun's forbidden
room at night because she misses her mistress terribly.
The keyhole scene establishes a pattern of an investigative woman
seeing herself in another feminine vision, and this pattern is carried to the
climactic scene where Ruimei follows a third woman, Yiming's cousin Gao
Fengjiao who lives nearby, to investigate a secret room in the mansion's
adjacent ancestry hall. Contrasted with the taciturn Ah Lan, Gao Fengjiao
appears friendly and supportive of Ruimei. Completely unsuspicious of Figure 10. Gothic horror in Bride from the
Hell (1965): Ruimei (Jin Mei) screams in
Fengjiao's motivation, Ruimei follows her into a secret room hidden behind utter terror after seeing in the keyhole an
a Buddhist altar (fig. 11) and is locked in from the outside, her screaming eyeball staring at her.
muffled by the thick stone wall. Fortunately, Ah Lan has spied on them
surreptitiously all along and is able to cry for help and direct the rescuers
to push the hidden entrance door open. In typical gothic manner, the
camera reveals a devastated Ruimei in front of the skeleton of her long-
disappeared sister Ruiyun, whose parting words written on the wall indicate
that Fengjiao is the murderer. As in Steaming Rouzong, the husband finally
Figure 11. The female fatale in Bride
realizes that Fengjiao deceived him into believing his wife's infidelity and
from the Hell (1965): the scheming cousin
murdered her rival in order to claim his love. Fengjiao (left) lures Ruimei (Jin Mei) to
a secret room behind the Buddhist altar,
Driven by female investigation, Bride from Hell plays on the tension
where Ruimei's sister was murdered
between blindness and vision and tackles issues of class, gender, and space.
earlier.

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First, it is Ah Lan, the ghostly, low-class young girl, who is able to see
through Fengjiao's deceiving appearance and comes to Ruimei's rescue.
In contrast, all other characters are blind in one way or another, especially
Yiming, who takes a long time to recognize the virtue in Ruimei, an
uncanny double of his disappeared wife. By this time, Ruimei's vision has
been blurred by Yiming's love for her; with their approaching wedding,
she naively buys into the idealized bourgeois family, just as her sister had
before her. Second, the female gender is no longer simplified as a mere
symbol of victimization as in The Opium War and The Early Train from Taipei
but is complicated by male phobia of the femme fatale, which is embodied
perfectly in Fengjiao's double-faced identity as a charming neighbor and
a ruthless murderer. In addition to the sisters Ruiyun and Ruimei, Fengjiao
also targets Yiming's new girlfriend's husband, whom she poisons to death
during a family party. Third, the domestic space of the bourgeois family
turns out to be a far cry from any idealized vision of "home, sweet home."
On the contrary, the mansion is constructed as a gothic space cast in scary
shadows, disturbed by sad songs, and haunted by images of horror and
murder. What is paradoxical is that this arguably masculine, hellish space is
first taken over by female jealousy and then restored by the double female
investigation. Read in this perspective, the title, Bride from Hell , implies
both the destructive and the transformative power of the female gender,
and the sheer incompatibility of the two terms "bride" and "hell" thus
hints at the fundamental instability of the bourgeois family, despite the
film's happy ending with a wedding.
Inarticulate Sadness: Female Sexuality and Male Anxiety

As horror, Bride from Hell offers plenty of gothic images to engage the
viewer, but as romance, the love story between Yiming and Ruimei lacks
credibility (Huang Ren 2006: 199) - decades later the director Xin Qin (b.
1924) admitted that the hastily produced film (shot in twenty-six days)
would still make him blush with embarrassment (Guojia dianying ziliaoguan

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1994: 132). This is partly because the film develops the lovers' feelings for
each other in a rather superficial way, such as depicting them on vacation
out of town, where the open space compels them to literally see each
other in a new light and where his daughter's injury in a bicycle accident
makes Yiming realize that he needs a caring wife and his daughter wants
a new mother, roles that Ruimei embodies perfectly. However, given the
dominant feminine visions in the film, the viewer rarely gains access to
male characters' thoughts.
This imbalance in gendered visions is avoided in Xin Qi's film Dangerous
Youth (Weixian de qingchun, 1969), in which a rebellious young man
struggles with his low social status and inarticulate sadness. Dangerous
Youth features the same narrative triangle of one man caught between
two women as does Bride from Hell , but this time the viewer follows the
male protagonist in an adventurous tale of seductive sexuality. The titular
metaphor of "dangerous youth" is best captured in a series of thrilling
motorcycle rides. The film opens with a long take of Hou Kuiyuan (Shi Ying),
a delivery man working for a cosmetics company, speeding his motorcycle
along a highway to a sound track of upbeat music. The thrill is short-lived,
however, as the motorcycle's rear tire goes flat and Kuiyuan's unnamed
girlfriend abandons him soon thereafter. In the second instance, Kuiyuan
zigzags and circles around an open field with his new girlfriend, Qingmei
(Zheng Xiaofen), on the back of his motorcycle. The repeated circular
motion - along with the loud engine sounds - makes her both excited and
light-headed. The sexual connotation of the motorcycle ride comes to the
fore in a third sequence, in which Kuiyuan takes Qingmei over a bridge,
down a country road, and onto a hillside, where the two lovers enact
a classic romantic routine of chasing and embracing. But the passenger
seat on the back of Kuiyuan's motorcycle is a space of easy replacement
and displacement: just as she has replaced Kuiyuan's first girlfriend, her
relationship with Kuiyuan is threatened with displacement. In another
scene in the open field, the pregnant Qingmei walks alone after Kuiyuan

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has informed her that he does not want to keep the child, but this time
the familiar sound of the motorcycle engine (which has been associated
with her joy rides with Kuiyuan) comes from three motorcycles driven by
unknown men who corner Qingmei, already distressed, in a vulnerable
position.
Qingmei's distress intensifies as she goes to a clinic for an abortion
(though when she hears babies crying, she changes her mind). By this time
in the film, Kuiyuan has become both an agent and an object of sexual
seduction. He introduces Qingmei to Yuchan (Gao Xingzhi), the female
owner of an upscale nightclub, who in turn arranges for her to become a
mistress to the senile board director, Qi, and to live with him in his spacious
villa. Yuchan pays Kuiyuan above market price for his introduction of
Qingmei, and their financial relationship quickly evolves into a steamy
sexual one. A shrewd businesswoman, Yuchan sees through Qingmei's
scheme of swindling money from Qi and then settling into a marriage
with Kuiyuan, so she summons Kuiyuan to her room, pays him a stack of
cash, and orders him to end his relationship with Qingmei. The power of
Yuchan's money is such that Kuiyuan yields to her seduction, and the two
consummate their passion in a weekend trip to a beach resort, where the
half-naked Kuiyuan is seen drinking from a bottle and the shadows of
Yuchan's naked body are projected onto the wall as she dresses after a
shower. The camera follows the couple to the balcony where they enjoy the
beautiful evening scenery and then to the bedroom where they passionately
kiss. Dangerous Youth demonstrates that by the 1960s, Taiyu films could
deliver Hollywood-style romantic mise-en-scène.
Yuchan, who drives a convertible and wears sunglasses, is a femme
fatale who seduces her desired male partner but who simultaneously
threatens him with sexual power enhanced by her economic status. Caught
between Yuchan's overpowering sexual/monetary seduction and Qingmei's
genuine love for him, Kuiyuan makes the conventional Hollywood-romance
decision to refuse Yuchan's offer of money and bid her farewell. In spite

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of Yuchan's hysterical reactions - first slapping him on the face and then
hugging him in apology - Kuiyuan pushes her away and declares that he
no longer needs their "mutual business" of sexual seduction. Kuiyuan finds
Qingmei by a creek, apologizes, and pledges his love for their unborn baby.
This conventional happy ending is reaffirmed by an unexpected change
in the femme fatale figure: as the camera cuts to Yuchan sitting in her
convertible by the roadside watching the lovers embrace, the viewer learns
that Yuchan is moved by their true love and wants to help them get out
of the seduction scheme.
In his assessment of Xin Qi's distinctive contribution to Taiyu films,

Liao Jinfeng (2001: 162, 214) judges Dangerous Youth to be "the most
critical" (zuiju pipangxing) of all Taiyu films and its "radical subversiveness"
to be unprecedented in Taiwan film history: no character in the film is
completely good, and their reckless indulgence in dance, drink, money,
and sex carries on to the end of the film. In Liao's view, Xin Qi rejects any
clichéd happy ending in his attempt to disrupt the existing social order.
Admittedly, the film's presentation of female sexuality avoids a moralistic
tone and adopts a largely naturalistic - albeit still voyeuristic - manner,
and from Qingmei's donning of her sexy pajamas in Kuiyuan's cramped
room to Yuchan's licking of Kuiyuan's naked chest, Xin Qi has no qualms
about exhibiting the aggressive - and even transgressive - female body and
sexuality as a conspicuous sign of urban modernity in Taiwan of the late
1960s, a period when "soft porn" was adopted as a new tactic to revive
public interest in Taiyu films.16 Nevertheless, the voyeurism here confirms
16 See Liao Jinfeng 2001: 184. Huang Ren
(2006: 272) prefers the term "yellow line"
precisely the film's dominant male gaze, which produces not only male
(huangse luxian) to Liao's "soft porn."
pleasure through scopophilia but also male anxiety over increasing femaleAnother example of transgressive female
sexuality in Dangerous Youth is Qing-
monetary and sexual power. Because of his lower-class origin, Kuiyuan is
mei's mother, who carelessly flirts with
troubled by his status as a handsome gigolo kept by Yuchan, and his sense
her sex partners in front of her daughter.
of inferiority, which sometimes borders on self-pity and self-hatred, gives

rise to the inarticulate sadness that has disturbed him throughout the film.
His final refusal of Yuchan's professed affection for him, therefore, could

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be read as a protest of the have-nots against the establishment. After all,
17 Kuiyuan belongs to a rare breed of Kuiyuan's credo, his last line of defense as a "rebel without a cause,"17 is
reckless young male characters who are
"love is more important than money." In this sense, Dangerous Youth still
portrayed sympathetically in Taiwan
cinema during the 1960s. Though the manages to imply, contrary to Liao Jinfeng's assertion, an imaginable happy
resemblance is there, it is difficult to
future for a rebellious young couple, and this implication actually works
establish a direct influence on Danger-
ous Youth from the Hollywood classic to enhance the radical subversiveness that Liao notes.
Rebel Without a Cause (dir. Nicholas
Ray, 1955).
The Significance of Taiyu Films
In this essay, I have demonstrated a variety of means by which Taiyu films

of the 1960s articulate sadness and gender space. One distinctive feature
of Taiyu melodramas of this time is their consistent emphasis on male
suffering, most noticeable in the trope of male disabilities in The Early Train
from Taipei and Steaming Rouzong, and this emphasis has ensured that
sadness would remain a dominant structure of feeling for their male as well
as female characters in later films. Nonetheless, toward the second half of
the 1960s, I detect a slight change in sadness asa narrative strategy: rather
than piling one tragedy onto another to their male and female characters,
these films tack a happy or potentially happy ending onto an otherwise
sad or tragic story, as in Bride from the Hell and Dangerous Youth. In other
words, within the general framework of sadness, Taiyu films of the 1960s
were able to explore other emotional and narrative possibilities.
A few examples suffice to illustrate such explorations. First, in spite of
its ghostly atmosphere, a discordant note of humor is struck in Bride from
Hell when the 007 theme music unexpectedly occurs in the background as
people are desperately looking for the missing bride around the mansion,
and the fact that the audience might burst into laughter at that particular
moment lends a quality of self-reflexivity to the film (Huang Ren 2005: 62).
Another self-reflexive moment occurs in the film's last shot, when the bride
and the groom wave goodbye to the audience in a convertible cruising

down a country road (fig. 1 2). This gesture toward the extra-diegetic space,
in Liao Jinfeng's reading (2001 : 1 34-1 37), is precisely part of what qualifies

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Figure 12. Romance in Bride from the Hell (1965): Ruimei (Jin Mei) and Yiming (Ke Junxiong)
as the blissful newlywed on route to their honeymoon in a convertible car.
Taiyu films as a "transitional cinema" between early cinema's presentational

mode of open diegesis and classical cinema's representational mode of
closed diegesis in the history of world cinema.
The comic reference to 007 in Bride from Hell hints at the rich
intertextuality of Taiyu films of the late 1960s. Many scholars have identified
a wide array of transnational elements Taiyu films appropriated from Japan,
Hong Kong, and international genre films (Huang Ren 2008; Taylor 2009; Ye
2006). Moving beyond the sadness associated with gezaixi, ballads, popular
songs, and radio stories, Taiyu films created a new world of heterogeneity
and cosmopolitanism, which is evident in its espionage films. As in Bride
from Hell, the 007 theme music occurs in an unlikely scene in The Agent
Red Rose (Jiandie Hong meigui, 1 966), in which the underground 18
Chinese
The first 007 film is Dr. No (dir. Terence
Young, 1962), released long after WWII,
agents break into a Japanese prison to rescue their comrade. Historical
which is the setting for The Agent Red
inaccuracy notwithstanding,18 The Agent Red Rose plays with the trick
Rose. of a

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double-faced woman and features its titular female agent in masquerade:
it is not until a pivotal scene in the nightclub where a Chinese collaborator
recognizes the visual resemblance between the Chinese words "Qianhong"
in a neon display and 4332 (4 for "qian" [thousand] and 332 for "hong"
[red] which is Red Rose's code) that the viewer finally connects the two
opposing images of Red Rose - on the one hand, a masked agent clad in
a black outfit who always rescues her comrades at the last minute and,
on the other hand, a sexy seductress who sings Mandarin and Taiyu songs
in a nightclub and dallies with the Japanese in her identity as an adopted
daughter of a high-ranking Japanese officer. Red Rose's double identity
becomes even more complicated in The Real and the Fake Red Rose (Zhenjia
Hong meigui, 1966), in which two agents clad in the similar black outfits
confuse both the resistance fighters in the film and viewers of the film. The
fact that the Red Rose character in both films is played by Bai Lan (b. 1 938),
the Taiyu movie queen who delivered such memorable performances as the
suffering protagonist in The Last Train from Kaohsiung and The Early Train
19 Bai Lan was elected the "movie from Taipei and who embodies the face and voice of sadness,19 indicates
queen" through popular votes conduct-
that the cosmopolitan emphasis in the second half of the 1 960s had moved
ed by Taiwan Daily in 1965 and acted in
more than 150 Taiyu films (Huang Ren Taiyu films gradually beyond sadness to include other prominent elements
1994a: 444-445).
such as humor, irony, and self-reflexivity, at least in such genres as comedy,
20 For instance. Brothers Wang and Liu espionage, and martial arts.20
as 007 (Wangge Liuge 007, 1967) was
This rich layer of intertextuality brings us back to the characteristic of
a comedy produced to capitalize on
the international popularity of the 007 syncretism Chun-chi Wang (2012: 76, 98) identifies in Taiyu films. She cites
franchise and an earlier popular Taiyu
Michel Foucault and proposes reenvisioning Taiyu films as "a node within
comedic series. Brothers Wang and Liu
Touring Taiwan (1958). a network": "As a peripheral regional cinema [that] tried to rival other
(inter)national cinemas," Taiyu films "incorporated whatever established
conventions they could grasp in order to be appealing and competitive,"
and ultimately it is Taiyu cinema's "transnational quality . . . that makes
it locally specific." Wang's examples of locally specific alterations in Taiyu
adaptions of Japanese gendai-geki melodrama include rewards for male
and female protagonists who uphold traditional patriarchal virtues,

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as opposed to their Japanese counterparts who tend to transgress the
existing moral boundary in their pursuit of Westernized values such as
love, freedom, and individualism. Similarly, a comparative study of Mistress
of Mellyn and its Taiyu adaptation in Bride from Hell unravels a series of
changes that has replaced the sinister gothic setting of the original novel
with the cosmopolitan look of Taiwan and has reconfirmed Confucian
family values over the American emphasis on female subversion. In both
cases, Taiyu films strike a more conservative note than their American and
Japanese counterparts, and such conservatism points to their distinctive
brand of cultural syncretism in a transition period.
Chun-chi Wang's vision of Taiyu films operating in "a node within a
network" dovetails with Kuei-fen Chiu's thesis on a new historical imaginary
of Taiwan as a transnational circuit of cultural flows rather than as a mere
victim of colonization by a succession of superpowers (2007: 27-28). To

supplement the dominant model of center and periphery, Chiù proposes
a "postcolonial paradigm of cultural translation" and argues that the new
"'translation as transformation' paradigm stresses the subversive play of
the local element in the process of adopting an encroaching culture" (201 1 :
86-88). More specifically, Chiù cautions us against the limits of the model
of opposition and intervention: "Insofar as the act of translation isa critical
engagement with the challenges posed by the other, a simplistic celebration
of local resistance does not enable us to fully address the complexity of
cultural translation that has increasingly come to define the mediascape of
our modern age" (201 1 : 94). Just as the Taiwanese benshi (bianshi) worked
as a cultural translator who performed alongside the screen to interpret
Japanese films creatively for local audiences, Taiwanese songwriters of
the 1930s resorted to scripted Taiyu and other local and foreign musical
traditions in articulating their newfound experience of being modern in
colonial Taiwan, as captured vividly by the documentary Viva Tonal: The
Dance Age (Tiaowu shidai, 2003).
Like benshi and songwriters in the colonial era, Taiyu films from the

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1960s adopted a syncretic approach that enabled them to translate and
transform various forms and media of cultural expression from different
parts of the world. Although the association of sadness may have
stigmatized Taiyu films in a discourse of victimization - dismissed and
repressed to the point of disappearance in popular memory of much of
the 1970s and 1980s - I have demonstrated the varying degrees of Taiyu
films' cultural agency through translation and transformation. Unlike the
early rival industry of Xiayu films, which were "certainly diasporic" and
"vehemently 'Chinese'" in their inspiration (Taylor 2011: 125), Taiyu films
benefitted not only from translating a distinctive experience of modernity
grounded in Taiwan but also from transforming the vernacular potential of
Taiyu by linking it to previous practices and contemporary resources. The
significance of Taiyu films, therefore, resides not so much in the possibility
of staging an opposition to KMT language policy and Mandarin cinema as in
their remarkable ability, through "translation as transformation," to carve
out a space where a dynamic cultural industry could thrive on articulating
sadness as a structure of feeling, a narrative strategy, and a geopolitical
vision, as well as on gendering space in order to engage contemporary
audiences and leave a remarkable legacy that would be taken up by New
Taiwan cinema in the 1 980s and its most recent interpreters in the twenty-
first century.

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Table 1
Selected Annual Film Productions in Taiwan
Year(s) Taiyu films Mandarin films

1954 Õ Ī
1955 2 1
1956 12 6
1957 62 4
1958 62 13
1959 40 12
1955-1959 total 178 41
i960 21 5
1961 37 7
1962 120 7
1963 89 8
1964 "97 22
1965 114 "24
1966 106 ~ ~ 45
1967 93 "49
1968 113 76
1969 84 "89
1955-1969 total 1,052 373
1970 18 -ģģ
"Ī97Ī 13 Ī0Ī
1972 21 59
1973 8 36
1974 1 65
1975 0 48
1976 0 51
1977 0 49
1978 ~Õ ~95
1979 1 120
1955-1979 total
Source: Lu 1998: Table 11. a.

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Table 2
Comparison of Taiyu Films and Xiayu Films
Year Xiayu films produced Xiayu films exhibited Taiyu films produced
in Hong Kong in Taiwan in Taiwan
_____ „ _ _
1948 ~ ~ Õ
1949 - Ī Õ
_____ . _ _
_____ __ ; Q
1952 10 - Õ
1953 6 1 Õ
1954 14 - Õ
_____ __ __ _
___ _ __ _
I957 39 26 62
_____ __ _ _
I959 89 24 40
_____ _ . _
Sour

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Glossary
Bai Ke
Bai Lan ÖM
Bai Rong âS
beiqing mm
bentu *±
bianshi »±
Chen Kunhou mim
Chen Yang mm
Chen Yunshang mmm
Chen Chengsan mm=
Dianying xinshang mmñkm
Hong Yifeng m-m
Hou Xiaoxian
fangong dalu
fangyan "fsm
Gao Xingzhi
gewutuan mnm
geyao mm
gezaixi mim
Gongle she WMtt
Guangdong mm
Guangxi mm
Guangzhou mm
guojia WM
Guomindang m&m
guoyu MB
guoyu pian mmn
Heluo
Hong Yifeng m-m
Hong Rongliang mmm
huangse luxian ĀĒĪŠS
jiankang xieshi mmmm
jinge mm
Jinma jiang
Jin Mei
Kejiahua
Ke Junxiong n'm
kongbu aiqing TSffiSffi
kudiaozi
kuqing

182.66.170.77 on Wed, 02 Jun 2021 21:44:36 UTC
Li Quanxi mmm
Li Xianglan mmm
Li Xing ?Í7
Liang Zhefu mm*
liangguang zongdu ffiJSSSS
Lin Zexu mm
Milan füren
Minnanyu IS ¡filli
Nanjing Ms*
Nanning
putonghua Mills
qinqie na
Quanzhou mm
rouzong
Shi Ying
Taiyu a In
Tuoku fengbo
Xiayu Bii
Xiayu pian ■ss*
xiangtu m±
Xie Jin mm
Xin Qi ¥«
Xinwenju mmm
Yang Ming mm
Ye Fusheng li Iti lÉ
Yuan Muzhi
yueqin RW
Zhangzhou if'Jtl
zhengce pian mmn
Zheng Xiaofen 815^5?
zhengzong ¡E^
Zhongying
zuiju pipangxing mmmm
Filmography
Aba ßqJH (Abba). Dir. Hung Jung-Liang 2011.
Beiqing chengshi (City of sadness). Dir. Lin Fudi WÎSitë. 1964.
Beiqing chengshi ^'|||i®rtī (City of sadness). Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien

1989.

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Diyu xinniang (Bride from hell). Dir. Xin Qi 1965.
Dushi fengguang tßrfrlÜlTt (Cityscape). Dir. Yuan Muzhi WfiLŽ.. 1935.
Fengnü shiba nian (Faking madness for eighteen years). Dir.

Bai Ke 05Ē. 1957.
Fengyun ernü SSfā^ (Children of troubled times). Dir. Yuan Muzhi M

«2. 1934.
Gaoxiong fade wei banche (The last train from

Kaohsiung). Dir. Liang Zhefu 1963.
Guihua xiang (Osmanthus alley). Dir. Chen Kunhou 1987.
Huangdi zisun (Children of the Yellow Emperor). Dir. Bai Ke Ö

5Ě. 1955.
Jiandie Hong meigui faļlf &I&SI (The agent Red Rose). Dir. Liang Zhefu
mm*. 1966.
Jiuqing mianmian BUSS (Lingering passions). Dir. Shao Luohui

n. 1962.
Kenü 19^ (Oyster girl). Dir. Li Xing 1963.
Lin Zexu fàlOfè (Lin Zexu). Dir. Zheng Junli SUēM, Cen Fan 1959.
Liu caizi xixiang ji TsTT^ĒSIIē (Six talents' romance of the west

chamber). Dir. Ye Fusheng ÛÎSÎË. 1955.
Shao rouzong 'iUfàl* (Steaming rouzong). Dir. Xin Qi 1969.
Taibei fade zaoche nibfiWPH (The early train from Taipei). Dir. Liang
Zhefu 1964.
Tiaowu shidai (Viva tonal: the dance age). Dir. Chien Wei-ssu ffi
island Kuo Chen-ti Wtt Ê. 2003.
Wangge Liuge 007 īEūī#Pīī007 (Brothers Wang and Liu as 007). Dir. Wu
Jianfei 1967.

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Wangge Liuge you Taiwan 3īlī$PIī5Ī!ā;it (Brothers Wang and Liu
touring Taiwan). Dir. Li Xing 1958.
Wangyang zhongde yitiao chuan ll^ßp (He never gives up).

Dir. Li Xing ?Í7. 1978.
Wanshi liufang StĚ/TSí? (Eternity). Dir. Pu Wancang hÄÄ, et al. 1943.
Weixian de qingchun /bPwWÄ# (Dangerous youth). Dir. Xin Qi

1969.
Wuyue shisan shangxin ye - 1S!/C,'?£ (A heartbreaking night on

May 13). Dir. Lin Boqiu 1965.
Xiaoshi de wangguo: Gongle she (The lost kingdom).

Dir. Lee Hsiang-Hsiu 1999.
Xue Pinggui yu Wang Baochuan li^FSiSiîBilll (Xue Pinggui and Wa

Baochuan). Dir. He Jiming fqlBBB- 1956.
Yapian zhanzheng JSftJKP (The opium war). Dir. Li Quanxi

1963.
Yapian zhanzheng Ě/ŤKP (The opium war). Dir. Xie Jin H®. 1997.
Zhenjia hong meigui JHf§&D&íJÍ (The real and the fake Red Rose). Dir.
Liang Zhefu 1966.
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Articulating Sadness, Gendering Space: The Politics and Poetics of Taiyu Films from

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Taiyu Films: A Cinema of Sadness Once Forgotten in Taiwan

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 1

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2 • Articulating Sadness , Gendering Space

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Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 3

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as a perceptible structure of feeling till then.

4 • Articulating Sadness , Gendering Space

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West Chamber had a merely three-day

cultural media and practices.

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 5

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practices, and signatures" (Taylor 2009: 250). Following the example of

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 7

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social transformation, and for that reason I examine their construction

Second, theoretically, I endorse a recent effort in cultural studies

production (a model I elaborate on in the conclusion), Taiyu films could be

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 9

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Almost Beheaded: Endangerment of the Nation/Family

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Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 11

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Figure 2. Endangerment of nation/family in Opium War( 1963): a rehabilitated opium addict

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 13

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with homelessness and blindness, sadness is constructed simultaneously

Double-Faced: Contradictory Embodiment of Urban Modernity

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reminiscent of a comparable scene in the film's companion piece, The Last

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 19

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space invested with private emotions, and this distinctive configuration

Huoto: "Going home, my heart broken, my heart broken . . . Oh,

Xiulan: "Where are you, my man, please understand me, please

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114) described in a contemporary review as "a strong sense of agency in

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 21

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Feminine Visions: From Male Suffering to Female Investigation

22 • Articulating Sadness, Gendering Space